What is your daily routine like?
You wake up in the morning, and what is the first thing you do?
Do you get up straight away and make yourself a coffee?
Do you have a shower?
We are willing to bet that before you do either of these things, or anything else, in fact before you even lift the covers off and get out of bed, you reach over to your bedside table and pick your phone up.
You unlock the screen and go to your favorite social media network to see if anybody has posted anything interesting overnight.
Or perhaps you check your emails, or any text messages that you have missed.
Whether we like it or not the Internet is a huge part of our lives these days, and based on startling statistics and research out there, we believe that it is here to stay and won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
How Much Time Does the Average Person Spend on the Internet?
Believe it or not, staying up to date on social media, emails, and other online communication takes more of your time than you might realize.
There has been new research recently that has found that the average American spends 23 hours a week using social media, texting, and emailing. This means that they spend almost 14% of their total week on the Internet.
Naturally, you can’t spend this much time per week on something, and not have it take a toll. What’s really interesting is that 44% of respondents in the survey said that they have tried to decrease their dependence on technology over the last year, favoring in-person contact more.
This number is only set to increase, with 62% of people in the United States that use the Internet saying that they hope to decrease how much time they spend using tech in their lives, so that they can communicate more face-to-face.
However, despite their valiant efforts, people have spent an increased amount of time over the last year using social networks, watching videos online, emailing, playing games online, or writing or reading blogs.
Also, time spent every day on newspapers, online radio, and magazines has stayed the same over the past year.
One interesting statistic that might surprise you is that the biggest time consumer is email.
Respondents to studies showed that most people spend almost 8 hours a week checking their emails. Other people said that they spent almost 7 hours a week using Facebook, and 5 hours a week using YouTube.
Respondents said that they spent almost the same amount of time on Twitter and Google+. When it comes to how often a user checks their social media platforms, this varies, with more than 75% of users checking their Instagram, Facebook, email, or text messages at least once a day.
There are other new platforms out there that are increasing in popularity as well.
It appears that websites that are photo focused, especially if they are well suited to a smartphone, are becoming more and more popular.
Instagram sees 70% of its users logging in every day, and Snapchat sees 67% of its users logging in every day. Two-thirds of users also say that they check YouTube once a day, and 60% say that they check Google+ every day.
Only 40% of people who use LinkedIn say that they check the website every day, but almost half of these people check it a number of times a week.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, people are really making an effort to decrease the amount of time that they spend online and increase the amount of time they spend with their loved ones, but the disadvantage is that the Internet is pretty addictive, and as more social media sites pop up, the temptation to spend your time online becomes even greater.
It is clear to see that we are all spending more time than we’d like to be, and it’s really up to conjecture whether this time is going to increase in the future or not
Sources
| eMarketer | Business News Daily | The Small Business Blog |
